Man hunted down and shot

Apparently someone found his hiding spot and carried him to the parking lot. They may have intended to take his body somewhere else but got spooked and ran and left his body.

DaShawn never got to see his baby daughter born days after his murder.

His body was in the parking lot all night, and sprinklers drenched his body and washed away some of the blood and possibly some evidence if he was carried to the location. A passerby discovered it the next morning. Cato was 22.

When Bowen returned home from work the next day the light on her answering machine was on. She had had an unexplainable feeling of dread that day at work. Someone from the coroner’s office had left a message to call. She cried as she recalled that moment.

“It’s unbearable,” Bowen said.

DaShawn was only a baby when Lenora Bowen began taking care of him.

His parents were strung out on drugs and didn’t care for him. Bowen would have one of her kids pick the baby up and bring him to Bowen’s house and watch him until she came home from work.

“It was sad. He was just so misused at home,” Bowen said. “He was only a few months old.”

Eventually, DaShawn stayed with his aunt Lenora permanently and she raised him as one of her own.

DaShawn had learning disabilities after suffering symptoms from fetal-alcohol syndrome.DaShawn had known several kids his age who were gang members but he was never involved himself.

Though he struggled in school, DaShawn graduated from George Washington High School. He was always a soft-spoken person who didn’t have a lot to say.

After school, he had various jobs including that summer at an Elitch Gardens concession stand.

Two days before he died, on a Friday, Bowen gave her son money to buy a bus ticket. He was going to pick up his check from work and cash it at a check cashing business.

Bowen told him to remember that he was only days away from becoming a father and should save his money to help care for the baby.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.